Military Academy Athlete Grads Go Pro Immediately?

President Donald Trump supports this, and he’s actually serious.

I am going to look at doing a waiver for service-academy athletes who can get into the major leagues, like the NFL, hockey, baseball, and they’ll serve their time when they leave professional sports. I imagine that would make recruiting a little bit easier[.]

This is foolish.  These guys got an excellent education at good engineering schools as well as a strong military and leadership training.  In return for paying zilch for that education, they accepted a multi-year commitment to serve on active duty in our armed forces and to begin that service upon graduation.

Delay that service in favor of a professional athletic career?  Let’s leave aside the morality of such a thing and what it says to the less athletically stellar cadets who don’t have professional sports careers in the offing.  Look, instead, at the practical outcome.

A professional baseball career can last for years—a decade or more (ignoring outliers like Cal Ripken), even longer if AAA ball counts for this delay, serving as it does as continued prep for the majors and as rehab opportunities in later stages of a career (more on this in a bit).

A professional football or hockey career lasts quite a bit shorter—because of career-ending injury or accumulation of injuries.  What’s the value of a soldier, airman, marine, or sailor who’s so banged up that he can no longer ply his athlete’s trade by the time he reports for active duty?  Here we include that baseball player sent down for rehab.  What’s the risk he poses to the soldier, airman, marine, or sailor serving beside him in a fight?  What’s the additional medical cost this guy poses to the service required to wait on his appearance for duty?

How much time does such a man have left for his military career if he’s able to complete his professional sport career reasonably injury-free?

On the flip side are these two examples.  David Robinson, Navy Academy grad and basketball star, served his commitment promptly on graduation and then went on to a highly successful NBA career.  He needed no delay.

Napoleon McCallum, Navy Academy grad and football star, served his commitment promptly on graduation and then went on to a highly successful NFL career—until he had a career-ending injury during a Monday Night Football game.  McCallum’s injury, admittedly, was exceptionally gruesome, even for a terminating one, but blown knees that end careers are common in football:

[He suffered a] ruptured artery in his left knee, and tore three ligaments, tore the calf and hamstring from the bone, and suffered nerve damage in the knee. …McCallum’s surgeon told him that there was no chance of him ever being medically cleared to play again.

How fit for military duty would McCallum have been had he had that injury before serving his commitment?

This is a bad idea that needs no further serious consideration.

Wrong Vote Outcome

They didn’t vote the way they were supposed to, so there’ll be a whole new election.  No, not for Georgia governor, but for Mayor of Istanbul.  Based solely on Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plaint that there were “numerical mistakes,” “irregularities,” and outright “corruption” in that mayoral election—Erdoğan’s party didn’t win there; the Republican People’s Party’s Ekrem Imamoglu did—the Supreme Electoral Council has completely annulled the election and required a new one to be held.

Echoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) claim that if her Progressive-Democratic Party didn’t win big in 2020, President Donald Trump would refuse to accept the outcome, Erdoğan did just that in Istanbul:

a margin of only 15,000 votes in a city as large as Istanbul was too close to be fair.

And

He [Erdoğan] said a difference of “13,000 to 14,000 votes” was not enough in a city of 15 million inhabitants.

So his election board tossed the results.  This, after AKP spokesman Omer Celik, speaking for Erdoğan, promised

At the end of the day, we will accept the final result regardless of whether it is to our advantage or disadvantage[.]

Former German Greens leader Cem Özdemir, who has Turkish roots suggested that this shows Erdogan to be a

bitter old man, who has long passed the zenith of his power. …  In the world of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, everyone who thinks differently to him is a terrorist, and every election he loses is a sham election[.]

Apparently not so far past.  And there’s that echo, again.

Censorship Continued

The Poynter Institute, an organization that masquerades itself as a…watchdog…built a list of what it claimed to be unreliable news outlets and then urged censorship through boycotting these offending outlets. “Unreliable,” mind you, was determined by Poynter personnel.  Then they got caught, and they’re claiming to have withdrawn their list.

Here are two critical clues to the nature of their list. One is [emphasis added]:

…initially released a list of more than 500 “unreliable” news outlets purportedly “built from pre-existing databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers around the country.”

Even those purported researchers were carefully unnamed.

And this one:

The index was created with the help of an employee for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That’s by itself is a fatal condemnation.

From those two clues, it’s clear that the Poynter Institute got exactly what it was looking for.  It just got caught, like the Ezra Klein’s JournoList of a few short years ago.

Do we have, though, any reason to believe the list actually has been scrapped? Or is it merely being better hidden? Like that JournoList. This is, after all, a long-established member of the NLMSM.  The Managing Editor of Poynter, Barbara Allen, had this about that in her statement:

[W]e are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria. The list was intended to be a starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites that purported to offer news; it was not intended to be definitive or all encompassing

In other words, they’ll be back with a more effectively disguised version of their attempt at censorship, a censorship goal made plain by her next sentence. A starting place for readers and journalists to learn more about the veracity of websites, indeed. A “starting place” written by journalists and JournoList members who will define for us “veracity,” because we’re too stupid to recognize it on our own.

And not intended to be definitive….  Yewbetcha.

Anybody Else

Ex-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton thinks President Donald Trump should have been—would have been—indicted on the basis of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were he not President.

I think there’s enough there that any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted[.]

On the other hand, given the case that then-FBI Director James Comey laid out regarding Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents via her private, uncontrolled, and unprotected email server; her forwarding classified material via her unsecured emails; and her destruction of 30,000 pieces of evidence emails, she should have been indicted.

But then that was Comey, and that was Comey’s then-boss, ex-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s (D) secretive meeting with Clinton’s husband, ex-President Bill Clinton (D) on the latter’s airplane.

Anybody else who had engaged in those acts, or been fronted for in that way, would certainly have gone to trial.

The Mueller Investigation

Not just the report itself, but his investigation, too, that was the subject of his report. What were the circumstances of the investigation’s start?  What triggered it?  Who leaked so many parts of it?

Now that Mueller’s report of his investigation has been released, and especially since it largely exonerated President Donald Trump, it’s necessary to see what led to the expenditure of two years of personnel resources and millions of dollars on an investigation of a President of the United States that accomplished so little—and in some cases so redundantly.

The role of senior FBI personnel, the importance of the Steele dossier in the trigger event(s), the lies told the FISA courts to get warrants, the FISA court itself, the behaviors and roles of members of Mueller’s investigation team—these all have severely damaged the reputation of the FBI, and of DoJ generally in te case of the FISA court, and they have damaged more than that—they’ve severely harmed the ability of the FBI to function as a Federal law enforcement agency and of DoJ’s ability to handle actual justice.

Investigations into this, like the one to which AG William Barr has committed, are critical to restoring the FBI and DoJ and producing substantive sanction on those personnel who misbehaved during the run-up to the investigation, its start, and its conduct.

 

Largely exonerated: the putative purpose of the investigation was to look into Russia’s interference into our 2016 election process and attempted interference in that election itself.  On this, the investigation found conclusively that Russia did do those things, and it found that the Trump campaign, personnel involved, and Trump himself did not collude—had nothing at all to do with those attempts.  And that outcome, despite repeated attempts by Russian agencies to get those personnel to collude or to con them into colluding.

The investigation, on turning to claims of one form or another of “obstruction of an investigation/of justice/of…,” did find quite a bit of embarrassing information and a number of embarrassing incidents that will be used to attack Trump—and much of this derogatory information was cynically leaked over the course of the investigation.  Withal, a closer look reveals the overall exoneration here, too.

Much is made, in the report, of Trump’s public “attacks” on the investigation itself and its conduct.  This was, supposedly, pressure, interference, obstructive in nature.  This is, actually, nonsense—and it’s insulting to the personnel conducting the investigation, from Mueller on down.  Suggesting that Trump expressing his anger and distrust of the investigation and the investigators in Trump’s inimitable way is capable of influencing the investigators by the slightest iota is to suggest that those investigators—every single one of them, from Mueller on down—are such timid summer pansies that they would be bothered by those words.  On the contrary, there’s nothing more to these public remarks than those implied insults and textbook projection by those expressing concerns about the impact of Trump’s words.  Even when those expressions come from the investigators themselves via the report.  Perhaps those investigators didn’t belong on Mueller’s team—their weakness, if not their bias, is exposed by their “findings.”

Much is made, also, of Trump’s (at least according to the claims of Mueller’s interrogatees over the course of his investigation) ordering various staff members to fire Mueller, to “influence” witness/interrogatees prior to their interrogations, of Trump’s personal attempts (allegedly) of such tampering.  What’s ignored here, too, in assessing the meaning of these things (stipulating they’re accurately, if narrowly, described) are three things in particular.

One is that Mueller was never fired, nor was his investigation ever actually interfered with.  It proceeded to its full and Mueller-style objective finish.

Another, regarding the behind the scenes interactions, is that had Trump been serious about firing Mueller or interfering with the investigation, Mueller would have been fired, the investigation actually interfered with, witnesses/interrogatees actually interfered with, and so on.  In the realization, though, Trump did none of these things, staffers were not fired and replaced with those who would obey those “instructions,” Trump did not bypass those staffers and act himself, and on and on.  He did none of those things because he wasn’t serious, except in the anger of the moment, as a man falsely accused (not just wrongly so) and faced with a years-long drumbeat of biased publicity and petty partisan attacks (and not just on himself, but on his family and his friends and his advisors) vented his anger in those moments.  The fact is, despite the claims of interference, of outright obstruction, none occurred.  None occurred, not because staffers disobeyed Trump, as so many of the NLMSM would have it, but because there was nothing to disobey.

A third thing is all the information and documentation—millions of pages of it—that Trump willingly and voluntarily released to Mueller and his investigation.  All of this information was free for the asking.  All of this information would have exposed the contradictions of Trump’s…obstruction…and they did not because there was none.

And all of that information freely provided is cooperation, not obstruction, except in the Newspeak dictionary of Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM.

This is the backdrop that emphasizes the importance of Barr’s investigation, separate from that of the DoJ’s Inspector General.